Broadcasters hate Aereo. They hate Aereo a lot. So much so that they’re trying to bring the startup to the Supreme Court. Yes, of the United States. And depending on what happens, it may have wide-ranging effects on how you watch TV.

Just to review, what’s Aereo?

Aereo is an online service where, for eight bucks a month, you can record broadcast TV in your area on a cloud DVR, or stream it directly to, well, anything with a processor, really. You technically rent an antenna the size of a dime, as well, since just using one antenna would violate the law. Basically it’s a rentable antenna and DVR.

Does it eat ads or something? It sounds like a VCR, except on the Internet.

Nope, it shows the ads. You can skip them, of course, but it’s not automatic.

So why are networks making a federal case out of it, literally?

Basically, if Aereo gets traction, it will speed up the rapid change in the television industry; namely the networks collapsing and becoming Internet providers. Aereo is essentially a clever legal end run around retransmission fees; essentially, cable providers pay to retransmit broadcast networks. It can be up to 10% of their revenue.

Aereo can wipe all that out if it catches on. Not helping matters, at all, is that it enables cord-cutting in a big way.

Oh hell no. The Supreme Court takes less than 1% of the petitions it receives, and it has to be something of national importance. As seriously as we take our sports, it’s extremely unlikely a decision that’s been upheld in two levels of the judicial system that involves companies throwing lawyers at each other will go in front of the highest court of the land.

I don’t have Aereo in my area. Why should I care?

Because if the Supreme Court rejects the case, or takes it and rules in Aereo’s favor, it will open the floodgates. Essentially there will be a set of similar services fighting it out over who gets to bring you the broadcast TV you want.

It will also make cord-cutting easier if you’re willing to wait for cable shows to become available for sale and rent. That’s nothing to sneeze at in an industry where bills are headed to $200 a month by the end of the decade.

In other words, TV and how you watch it is about to become a much more dynamic and tumultuous industry. And it’ll directly benefit you.

I am always astounded when I hear that people still pay for cable. Especially the obscene prices in the USA. Seriously especially with technology nowadays. My new TV has a fucking built in browser(among a gazzilion other options I haven’t discovered and one of which I am sure will gain sentience and kill me someday) with which I can directly watch any show I want from streaming sites. And if I don’t want to bother I can always just torrent anything I want and put it on a flash drive that I directly plug in. And this TV cost me just 350$. That’s basically two three months iof that insanely expensive cable

So this truly leaves me baffled. I can understand old people who are afraid of technology but why would anyone capable of using a computer pay for this?

The networks here pay the sports leagues too much money for them to make internet streaming an option. For instance, the NFL offers an option for streaming overseas, but not in the US. The NBA offers a streaming option, but it doesn’t apply to nationally televised games, making cord cutting pointless.

Also, from what I hear, the not so legal streaming options vary in quality from “sucky” to “not as sucky.”

Yeah, televised sports is the big one. Or really, the NFL. The MLB, NBA, and NHL all at least have something resembling a sane option available. The NFL it looks like you’ll need to set up a proxy server.

Umm…I don’t think the picture is quite as rosy as you’re painting it. Aereo’s legality is based on a 2nd Circuit opinion that has not been followed in any other circuit, as far as I know. That’s why Aereo only launched in NY, and that’s why it’s not surprising that they’ve won all legal challenges to date. If SCOTUS denies cert, it doesn’t really open the floodgates for Aereo services to expand across the country. If they grant cert, it’s far from certain that they would rule in favor of Aereo (pretty unlikely, imo). A similar service in California already lost in district court and is appealing to the 9th Circuit.

So, yea, Aereo is awesome and I’m glad they’ve made it this far, but their whole business model depends on a rather quirky interpretation of the law that is only followed in a small region of the country. Even if they win at the Supreme Court they’d be vulnerable to Congress. I just don’t see this ending well for them.

Basically, Aereo hinges on the following question: Is what Aereo does a “public performance” under the law? So far, the answer has been “It is not”, since it rents an antenna to each user. And that’s the end of that. If I have a video recording device and an antenna attached to my television, that’s not illegal. If I have an HDTV antenna and a recording program connected to my computer, that’s not illegal. All Aereo is doing is putting it on the Internet and asking eight bucks a month for the convenience.

As for Congress passing a law to make Aereo illegal, that’s trickier than you might think. It’s pretty hard to make a law that would target just one company; it would inevitably suck others, like Netflix (or any DVR system that uses the cloud), into the mix.

Aereo does not rent out an antenna to each user, and as an electrical engineer that part of the conversation is just painful, but I’ll grant you that the courts have granted them that finding so far.

106(4) has never been Aereo’s real legal concern, though. The problem is that they make transient copies in memory to buffer video to users. Everywhere else in this country, that’s copyright infringement. The only reason they get away with it in the 2nd Circuit is _Cablevision_, which says it’s the same as personal time-shifting (your “recording program connected to my computer” example) as long as the buffering is unique to that user and done at the user’s direction. That reasoning doesn’t fly in the rest of the country (e.g., _MAI Systems_), which is why the Supreme Court might take the case to resolve the split. If they don’t, though, Aereo remains more or less confined to the NY area (absent further development in the law).

If NYC weren’t such a gigantic market, I doubt the networks would have any interest in going to the Supreme Court.